towo's procedure above did not give me x, but it DID GIVE ME A USABLE INIT 3, so i have dist-upgraded (but because no x i am posting from a different system).

Thats strange. Other then towo suggested in his post I didn't build up my xorg.conf file manually. Insteed I let aticonfig --initial do it's job. Don't know whether this was building /etc/ati/amdpcsdb.default or something with your installation went wrong, but it's present on my system.

ikeinthai wrote:

other than removing radeon from the blacklist what else do i have to do to go back to radeon?

Thats strange. Other then towo suggested in his post I didn't build up my xorg.conf file manually. I let aticonfig --initial do it's job. Don't know whether this was building /etc/ati/amdpcsdb.default or something with your installation went wrong, but it's present on my system.

1st, xmodule=vesa only works on life and need radeon.modeset=0 too.
2dn, as long as KMS is active, X cant's use vesa as fallback, since vesa does not load, if KMS is active.

hmm, that's not so fine, a working cheatcode to use vesa should exist for installed systems, too.
So you have to go to runlevel 3 and build a xorg.conf with driver=vesa and add the ...modeset=0 parameter to kernel command line in case of an failure?

ikeinthai

Post subject: thanks! Posted: 16.05.2011, 08:00

Joined: 2010-09-22
Posts: 119
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towo wrote:

1st, xmodule=vesa only works on life and need radeon.modeset=0 too.
2dn, as long as KMS is active, X cant's use vesa as fallback, since vesa does not load, if KMS is active.

thanks towo for the info.

the easiest way for me to get a useable tty seems to be to shut down, "e" and then "radeon.modeset=0" on the grubline, ctrl+x to boot, then choose "console login" from dropdown menu on the login screen.

this is fine for me. i just wanted to be able to dist-upgrade outside of x. if i want a useable tty i have to shut down first. would be better if that was not the case, but oh well.

gonna mark it solved(not init 3, but is command line outside of x. close enough). thanks for the help 8D